Yahoo has apparently lost yet another executive with the departure of Ron Will, former treasurer and vice president of finance at the Internet company. The man has decided to join video advertising startup BrightRoll.
Will was an executive at Yahoo for quite a while, from 2004 until the end of March, 2011, to be exact. As CFO, Will will oversee BrightRoll’s finance, corporate development and HR operations and report directly to CEO Tod Sacerdoti. → Read More
Chasing the general trend of people spending more and more time on their phones, video ad network BrightRoll announces today their expansion into mobile video advertising, attempting to expand inventory and lower CPM costs. Advertisers and third party buyers can now buy mobile pre-roll ads through BRX, BrightRoll’s video ad buying platform.
BrightRoll is one of the largest video ad networks, serving 65,489,000 uniques a month according to comScore. What’s interesting in this latest development is that rather than only placing video ads before video content (which is scarce outside of YouTube), BrightRoll is basically doing the same thing as it does online and serving up ads in front of any content on your phone, whether it be video, audio, games or apps → Read More
Online video ad rates keep coming down, but that could be a good thing. BrightRoll, a large video ad network, is reporting that cost-per-thousand (CPM) rates for pre-roll video ads across its network are down on average by 37 percent from a year ago, but total revenues across its network are up 84 percent. Cheaper ads are leading to more spending by advertisers overall.
The chart above shows average CPMs on BrightRoll’s network indexed to 100 at the beginning of 2008. The average CPMs are now in the mid-teens, and seem to be leveling off. They were down 4.5 percent from last quarter. → Read More
Video ads are the great hope of brand marketers on the Web. They are easy to understand (it’s just like on TV, kinda) and easy to create. That’s why pre-roll video ads will never die. Brand marketers love ‘em.
As the rates for pre-roll video ads on the Web go down, it looks like total video ad revenues keep going up. At least that is what is happening across BrightRoll’s video ad network. BrightRoll is one of the largest video ad networks, according to comScore VideoMetrix, with a reach of 51 million unique viewers in May, 2009, which is more than Yahoo’s video sites or Hulu. (But it doesn’t serve as many video streams as either one).
BrightRoll reports that in the second quarter: → Read More
The ad rates for online video keep coming down, and that is a good thing. Video ad network BrightRoll is about to release some data from the first quarter of 2009 which shows ad rates as measured in cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs) dropping 12 percent annually. The rate of decline is slowing from the 25 percent drop that video ad CPMs experienced during the fourth quarter of 2008. But if they fall farther that could be a good thing.
In a survey of 150 advertising executives in the U.S., more than half (53 percent) expect video CPM rates to be “marginally lower” a year from now, while another 20 percent think CPMS will drop in half. Video CPMs range broadly depending on whether the ads are being sold directly by sites with large video inventories or by ad networks, but a $20 CPM is a broad industry average. These still need to come down to between $7 and $9 to roughly match what advertisers are paying for commercials on TV on average (more like $15 for primetime, and as high as $50 for niche, targeted cable channels). These declining CPMs probably have something to do with the downward revision in ad video revenue estimates that we are starting to see.
(More data after the jump). → Read More
Some new data from video ad network BrightRoll suggests that Web video advertising is suffering along with every other category BrightRoll places video ads on top media and professional broadcast TV sites rather than user-generated video. In other words, this is the inventory that all the advertisers want, but there supposedly isn’t enough of it. Yet 50 percent of this “broadcast quality” video inventory goes unsold.
Amd while more advertising dollars keep pouring into this segment of Web video (BrightRoll claims its revenues grew 172 percent annually in the fourth quarter of 2008, up 12 percent sequentially from the third quarter—although it gives no absolute numbers), the rates advertisers are willing to pay keep coming down. → Read More
Video ad network BrightRoll relaunched this morning with a name change from PostRoller and now offers direct access to the ad insertion process for consumer video producers. The company’s technology serves up ads in multiple formats, monitors click throughs to determine which format is most effective and switches ad formats dynamically for the best results. Video publishers can choose to insert the most lucrative format, preroll ads, or allow BrightRoll to switch between video, banner or text post roll ads. The primary implementation of BrightRoll is to help publishers monetize content that they were unable to sell ads against. The company says that there is far more video content online than there is ad coverage available. I went through the company’s ad insertion process and can confirm that it is very easy to do. BrightRoll is also announcing that it has closed a series A round of funding, raising a total of $1 million from 9 angel investors and one institution, True Ventures. The angels include Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC, Michael Tanne from Wink and Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf. The full list is available on the BrightRoll site. BrightRoll’s technology is used to serve all of the pre and post roll ads on Metacafe and the company recently entered into a partnership with VideoEgg. The company launched in March and they are now live on 35 different sites. BrightRoll is part of what seems to be a growing trend, web 2.0 service providers starting in the B2B space and branching out to serve consumers directly. See also our coverage of BrightCove and Rightmedia (disclosure: TC8 party sponsor), two companies that are similar in some ways. BirghtRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti previously worked at Plaxo where he was responsible for the company’s monetization strategy and was part of the deal that sent the Plaxo mailing widget to YouTube. Today’s new direct to consumer offering from BrightRoll is largely targeting niche video sites around the web. When I asked whether online video wasn’t entirely dominated by a few large sites, CEO Tod Sacerdoti told me that there is a surprising number of niche video sites that see large amounts of traffic. He said that based on his observations of the space he believes there are hundreds of sites currently serving millions of video streams per day. Those niche sites can be particularly valuable to advertisers who want to “own a channel” for → Read More
